Rowland backtracks on year-long wait for reform after putting 30 centres on notice
The services hit with compliance notices from the Department of Education on Friday must inform parents of their status within 48 hours and will have up to six months to improve their performance or risk being stripped of funding. The centres have all failed to meet standards for seven years or more.
It comes as state and federal governments promise to build a national system by the end of the year to stop people banned from working with children in one part of the country from getting similar jobs elsewhere, fulfilling a decade-old royal commission recommendation.
But the plan to create a centralised portal to view state databases requires each jurisdiction to plug in their information, and stops short of establishing a national Working With Children Check system, leaving the application and approval process to the states and territories.
Rowland had flagged earlier on Friday that the new system could take up to a year to develop, but backtracked after the Standing Council of Attorneys-General met, promising it would be in place within months because 'we recognise that this is an area of the highest priority'.
The Department of Education noted the 30 alleged breaches of the National Quality Standards that cover childcare centres are not criminal in nature, but relate to failures on child health and safety rules.
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The government was granted the ability to strip funding from centres that were failing standards in legislation passed last month in response to successive issues, including in Melbourne where alleged paedophile Joshua Brown has been accused of sexually abusing eight toddlers and babies in his care and contaminating children's food with bodily fluids.
Failure to comply with the department's notices could result in conditions being placed on the service's child care subsidy approval, or approval being suspended or cancelled.
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But a search of Edge Early Learning, Morayfield, reveals it is 'meeting National Quality Standards' and that 'your child is made to feel supported and welcomed' and 'plays in a safe well-maintained environment.' There is no mention of the two assaults 18 months ago or the former centre director failing to notify parents. Another case involving Le Smileys Early Learning Centre at Gracemere made national headlines in 2022 after a three-year-old child was left on a bus for six hours, suffering heat stress so severe she was given a 5 per cent chance of survival. The Rockhampton centre operators pleaded guilty to 4 charges and were fined $50,000 in a Queensland court. But there's no mention of that on the Starting Blocks website, it too is 'meeting National Quality Standards' and keeping children safe. 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Professor Leah Bromfield runs the Australian Centre for Child Protection and oversaw research on the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse a decade ago. 'Transparency, to me, is an absolute first principle when it comes to responding to abuse and neglect,' she said. 'As a country, I think we thought we'd done this, we had learned about the dangers to children and institutions, and we'd learned. We built a huge amount of evidence about what to do differently. 'When this is kept a secret, the only winners are perpetrators and the reputation of institutions. We are not keeping the best interests of children at the centre of what we're doing.' Placing privacy provisions above the safety of children is what helped Australia's worst paedophile Ashley Griffith continue his vile offending at childcare centres for almost two decades. The Queensland Regulatory Authority has found a number of breaches by the centres where he was employed but won't reveal which ones have been hit with any compliance action. The breaches include 'failing to notify serious incidents within required timeframes, use of inappropriate or unreasonable discipline and failure to accurately record incidents or notify parents and guardians within prescribed timeframes'. One victim's father tried to warn the broader public about the regulator's secrecy after Griffith was sentenced to a minimum 27 years in prison for his crimes last year. 'Parents are walking their children into these centres today with a false sense of security in its excellence rating,' he said. 'Their kids are having naps on the same cots other kids were raped on, being watched by the same staff who failed to stop it from happening.' Whilst keeping the names of individual centres secret, a spokesperson for the Queensland Department of Education said the Regulatory Authority has 'communicated emerging findings and recommendations for prevention measures with the early childhood education and care sector'. 'Critically, the RA has also communicated the findings of the investigations completed to date to the Queensland Family and Child Commission, to inform the System Responses to Child Sexual Abuse Review currently under way,' the spokesperson said.
